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By Haley Williams

Haley Williams is a psychology/Plan I Honors senior in Dr. Elon Lang’s “Drama in the Archives” course. In the course, students used resources at the Harry Ransom Center to better understand plays, texts, dramatists, cultures from which they are drawn, and the archival process itself. Below, Williams shares her experience in the class.

In my first two years of undergrad, I often passed the “big glass buildings with the pretty pictures” on my way to and from class. I had even visited the exhibitions on occasion and meandered over to listen to a lecture from time to time. However, in my mind, the Harry Ransom Center was for graduate students and professors, a place off limits to undergraduate students such as me. Thankfully, this semester I was proven wrong.

One of my classes in the Fall 2014 semester focused on reading several plays with visits to the Ransom Center to comb through the archives of these playwrights. The final was a research project on one of the plays we had read in class. I had previously written a paper about A Streetcar Named Desire and knew this is where my research would begin. To do this, I was fortunate to have access to not only the archive of Williams himself but also the wealth of manuscripts, books, papers, letters, and notes from the Audrey Wood and Stella Adler collections. While using the Audrey Wood collection, I found folders about the production of the 1951 movie starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. One letter I found inspired further research into the different endings of the play and how they affected the meaning of the play.

In the letter to Joseph Breen, head of Hollywood’s motion picture production code office, Williams notes he has heard about the production company potentially removing the rape scene from the movie. Williams explains to Breen that this is not possible, as the rape of Blanche by Stanley is “a pivotal, integral truth in the play, without which the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the safe and brutal forces in modern society. It is a positive plea for comprehension.” He goes on to explain that he is willing to do whatever it takes to keep this within the movie because without the scene, the importance of the play will be completely removed.

What Williams really thought about the rape scene can be further examined when looking at some of the earlier drafts of the play. In an early draft of scenes 10 and 11, the rape scene that has become iconic thanks to the performance of Brando and Leigh is absent, and instead a consensual sex scene exists in its place. Following this scene is a morning of domestic bliss and tranquility between two consensual sexual partners. Instead of a brutal scene of violence, we see Blanche helping Stanley tie his tie and pick out a shirt to wear. The scene also ends with Blanche planning to leave using the bus ticket Stanley got her for her birthday, not with her removal to the asylum by the doctor and matron. By changing this one scene, Williams completely reworks the characters of Stanley and Blanche, showing that he experimented early on with alternatives for the rape scene that he later defends emphatically in his letter to Breen.

These endings to the play provide the path by which one can trace the progression of the play and possible reasons why Williams made these decisions. As these were early drafts of the play, the manuscript had lines marked out, suggestions for changing certain words, and even changes to names. Because he considered the rape of Blanche by Stanley to be important because of the symbolic message that it represented, he was able to understand, even early in the writing process, that this scene was imperative to his play. Having access to the Ransom Center’s collections as a student to discover these things for myself is something that few are able to claim and something that I am thankful we are able to do as students at The University of Texas at Austin.

Letter from Tennessee Williams to Joseph Breen and Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America regarding the rape scene in A Streetcar Named Desire. October 29, 1950. The Audrey Wood Collection. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.

Letter from Tennessee Williams to Joseph Breen and Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America regarding the rape scene in A Streetcar Named Desire. October 29, 1950. The Audrey Wood Collection. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.

By Kelsey McKinney

Milly S. Barranger, Dean at the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and Distinguished Professor Emerita at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, visited the Ransom Center in July on a fellowship funded by the Fleur Cowles Endowment to study the Audrey Wood papers for her upcoming book Audrey Wood and the Playwrights: Shaping American Theatre and Film in the Last Century. The book will be her fourth on pioneering women in the American theater in the mid-twentieth century. Below, she shares her experience working in the collections.

The Hazel H. Ransom Reading Room at the Ransom Center is a treasure of interstitial resources on American theater and its creators from Eugene O’Neill to Lillian Hellman and Terrence McNally. The Center’s award of a travel fellowship afforded me the opportunity to return for a second time to the Audrey Wood papers to do a complete review of the more than 60 boxes containing materials on the literary agent’s representation of playwrights and their plays for the commercial theater. The considerable files present the life and career of Audrey Wood (1905–1985), along with her clients and their playbills, scripts, musical scores, photographs, and correspondence, and the business records of the Liebling-Wood Agency. The correspondence between the literary agent and her clients reveals the nature of their relationships during Broadway failures and successes. As Audrey Wood said, the commercial theater is a “tough business,” and these files reveal just how difficult it was for clients and their agents in the mid-twentieth century.

Based on my experiences in other research libraries, I have concluded that the ability to work with a collection that consolidates materials on the subject results in a highly productive research experience. I have written on subjects that required travel from one collection to another to review the career and interactions with associates and co-workers. The Center’s large collection of materials affords the researcher the luxury of remaining in one place to scrutinize, in this instance, the literary agent’s life story.

In addition, the ambience and orderliness of the Reading Room favors uninterrupted scholarship in the knowledge that across the table from you other research fellows are hard at work on Irish dramatic literature or Tom Stoppard. In other words, although undisturbed, you share the company of exceptional scholars.

The splendor of the Reading Room is that the researcher’s needs have been carefully anticipated in the organization of the collections, the retrieval system for files, the attentive staff, and the ambience of the room itself. It is my hope that my next research project mandates a return to the Ransom Center.

By Jennifer Tisdale

Tennessee Williams visiting the Ransom Center reading room, November 2, 1973. Photograph by Frank Armstrong.Tennessee Williams will be inducted into the Poets’ Corner in The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, with celebrations beginning today. Previous inductees include Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams.

The Ransom Center holds materials that document the family, life, and work of the American playwright Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams. The collection contains numerous manuscript drafts, including those for the plays The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Also included are large amounts of newspaper clippings, correspondence, and photographs.

The Tennessee Williams collection was built from four major acquisitions in the 1960s with smaller amounts of material added over the years. The nucleus of the collection began with Williams’s own papers, acquired by the Ransom Center from 1962 to 1969. These materials included over 1,000 separately titled works, numerous clippings, and several boxes of correspondence. In 1964, the Center expanded the collection with the purchase of the correspondence between Williams and his agent, Audrey Wood. In 1965, the Center acquired a large number of manuscripts, including Williams’s first full-length play, Candles to the Sun, from Williams’s official bibliographer, Andreas Brown. Brown’s materials also included a complete run of Williams’s publications, and Brown’s own correspondence, notes, and drafts from his work on Williams’s bibliography.

The Williams family papers were also acquired in 1965 from Williams’s mother, Edwina Dakin Williams. These materials included original manuscripts and works of art by Williams, over 700 letters, scrapbooks, personal memorabilia, and 650 photographs.